How Nutanix Is Taming Operational Complexity

Chances are, it’s not the infrastructure, singular, your organization is running your workloads on — it’s the infrastructures, plural. Sixty percent of enterprises deploy to multiple IT infrastructures, according to Nutanix, a cloud computing company. Dealing with multiple deployment environments brings up three big challenges, said Deepak Goel, CTO for cloud native at Nutanix, in this episode of The New Stack Makers. For starters, there’s the operational complexity and the perennial shortage of skilled engineers to run cloud native systems. Survey after survey has highlighted skills gaps in the IT workforce, Goel told me in this On the Road episode of Makers, recorded at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, in Atlanta. Many engineers “have been working on the infrastructure side for a long time,” he said. But have “yet to gain expertise on cloud native and Kubernetes in particular.” Moving legacy workloads from virtual machines (VMs) to cloud native platform, which are geared for a microservices-based architecture, is another challenge. And the third big challenges? “While this transition is happening, how do you run virtual machine-based workloads alongside with containers, because these are two different platforms, often run in silos,” Goel said. For an IT sysadmin, he noted, “this becomes really challenging … it’s a different mode of operation,” and one with “a steep learning curve.” Platform Engineering, IDEs and NDK Organizations have tried a number of things to tame operational complexity and the skills gap Goel noted. The platform engineering movement is one way to make the most of Kubernetes expertise within an IT team, putting a small group to work on abstracting infrastructure provision so that developers can use a “golden path” to deployment. IDEs are another way organizations tame complexity. An internal developer platform handles the “heavy lifting” that would otherwise fall on individuals, Goel said. It might, for example, provide capabilities like observability and security, he said, “so that the organization can focus on their own business applications, and then basically unifying, or finding a platform that can unify their VM-based workloads and container workloads.” Nutanix’s contribution to the cloud native ecosystem is called “hyperconvergence,”  the integration of compute and storage into a single platform, supporting both VMs and containers. During KubeCon in Atlanta, the company announced the release of version 2.0 of its Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes (NDK); Goel noted that this new version brought in an Advanced Data Protection functionality. For instance, he said, NDK allows for “a sync replication that really helps to make your cluster fault-tolerant and make that cluster resilient.” In addition, he added, “We are heavily going deep into the security because now, as more and more organizations are adopting Kubernetes, cloud native security is paramount. And so we have recently announced our partnership with Canonical to provide secure OS. So we provide, out of the box, [a] secure hardened operating system for our customers on which they can run Kubernetes. “ Check out the full episode to learn more about NDK and about the promise AI holds for taming operational security. The post How Nutanix Is Taming Operational Complexity appeared first on The New Stack.